Russ Allbery wrote:
> Thomas Viehmann <tv@beamnet.de> writes:
>
>
>>Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure how the existence of more
>>packages that should be orphaned invalidates dealing with those that
>>presently are.
>
>
>>There's 169 orphaned packages today, why not do something about them?
>
>
> The thing is... most of the orphaned packages are in fairly good shape.
How do you know?
> Most of the orphaned packages are orphaned because they're obscure and the
> person who cared about the package has left the project or run out of
> time. However, they are probably still working fine for people with those
> obscure needs, and as such there isn't an obvious significant gain for
> Debian by getting rid of them.
I think that not shipping unmaintained and unsupported packages is a
benefit. Packages need a maintainer to enter, I think they should need
one to stay.
Look at dcl as a random example. I think that not having a maintainer is
quite a burden when security bugs such as the one fixed shortly before
sarge release occur after release and this is when the upstream seems up
to speed and people (here Joey Hess) in Debian track security reports
globally, otherwise, security bugs might even go unnoticed.
Also, I'm not sure how much the important bug impedes the functioning of
the package, IMHO it would be rather bad if new installation was
impossible with postgresql without documenting it beforehand.
Using dbconfig-common probably would also be on a maintainer's todo list.
So really, while the QA maintenance is certainly fine ATM, the package
probably isn't as well supported as we would expect from a designated
maintainer.
Note that dcl was deliberately kept out of woody for being unmaintained...
Kind regards
T.
--
Thomas Viehmann, http://thomas.viehmann.net/